7 Formerly Popular Sites that Are Dying

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Sunny days sometimes turn dark and dismal. A shirt that looked
good on the rack at Target now sits in the bargain bin at
Goodwill. And, that new car with the Hemi engine and the
third-row backseat? It now drives like a crusty tank.

The same is true of websites. What seemed so fresh when you first
registered now seems like a ghost town. What happened? According
to Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg, site visitors routinely
check the door to see if anyone else is leaving for better
services. Like lemmings, they can pull up stakes and leave in a
heartbeat. (Facebook, are you listening?) All you can hear are
the crickets.

1. Gawker.com

This popular gossip site's traffic has dropped 75 percent this
year, according to Compete, and has wallowed in its own bad press
over the years: cuts in freelancer budgets, a stalker map that
showed the location of celebs, and several site changes. At the
same time, tech sister-site Gizmodo has risen in the ranks,
growing views by 10 percent this year.

Sometimes, it’s hard to say whether a Web site is actually dying.
Chatroulette.com is a site that lets you chat with a stranger;
sometimes, the stranger is naked. Visitor counts are on the rise
again, hovering around 1 million after a 25 percent drop this
year, per Compete.com. The site went live in late 2009, and Wired
wrote about it early last year. Andrey Ternovskiy from Russia
created the site when he was 17. What has died out is the press
coverage: the tech media is not touching the site anymore. Most
critically: the site offers nothing extra beyond what you can do
on Skype. “Chatroulette was a fad, an interesting one for a
while, but was invaded by male exhibitionists, and most people
aren't into that sort of voyeurism,” says Roger Kay, an analyst
with Endpoint Technologies (www.ndpta.com).

Statistics don’t lie -- they just help explain the mystery.
Digg.com started out in 2004 as the brainchild of San Francisco
whiz-kid Kevin Rose and allowed visitors to “digg” a link so that
everyone could see what was popular. In the past year, the site
has been bleeding users by the boatload. There were 8 million
visitors in January; this month, there were only about 3 million,
per Compete.com. That’s a 60 percent drop. Competitor Reddit,
which has maintained an interest level, is not so ad-centric. But
the real killer is Twitter, which has become a link aggregator
and social medium. Kay agrees: many people find their Web links
on Facebook these days.

4. MySpace.com

You would think MySpace would have gotten the message by now: we
don’t like ugly banner ads that fill the page, and a consistent
user interface is more appealing to most than one that allows
crazy customizations. MySpace had 30 million visitors in July,
per Compete.com, but Facebook squashed them like a bug with 150
million. The real story: MySpace had 64 million visitors in last
year in July. That’s a 54 percent drop. Gartenberg says the drop
is almost inexplicable: users just gave up on visiting. Kay
argues that the brand was somehow tarnished and uses antiquated
technology.

Going from 2M users to just 600,000 in one year might seem like a
crushing blow. But consider this: AOL bought the upstart social
network in 2008 for $850 million. According to Bloomberg
Businessweek, AOL sold it for just $10 million last year. So what
happened? This one is a mystery. Kay says that there is no real
explanation, because the site offers similar services to Facebook
and even Tumblr.com.

6. Salon.com

One of the oldest and most-beloved online magazines, Salon.com
has sunk like a rock lately, losing about one million regular
visitors over the past year, per Compete.com, a 37 percent
decline. Once again, there is no reasonable explanation for the
sharp decline, but there are a few clues. The user-hemorrhaging
started almost immediately last November when the main editor,
Joan Walsh, took a back-seat to write a new book. Many online
magazines have struggled to balance free content with paid
services, and Salon tends to be a little ad heavy at times. Kay
says Salon has had a hard time competing with classier mags like
The New Yorker.

7. Blogger/Typepad

Blogging is dead – or at least it has shifted to another medium.
Now, instead of typing several pages worth of material, most Web
users just tap in a 140-character sentiment on Twitter.
“Long-form” blogging is not as popular, and we all know the jokes
about the blogger in his parent’s basement. Sites like
Blogger.com and TypePad.com have declined considerably of late,
dropping about 25 to 30 percent in user visits per Compete.com.
Granted, some have discovered the streamlined blogging tool
WordPress.com, which has enjoyed steady growth the past few
years.

8. Slashdot.org

Sadly, one of the best tech sites on the Web has seen declining
user involvement. Started as a home project focused mostly on
computer tech, the site grew to almost one million users back in
2008. Quantcast.com shows a bar graph that looks like a ski
slope: user counts dipped down to just over 100,000 in April,
although the latest counts are in the 500,000 range.